The delivery of communications, information and entertainment services is often driven by customer orders, where customers or users enter information that describes themselves, their preferences and the service(s) they wish to have. In many cases, the set of steps necessary to fulfill such orders is written in software code that is compiled and executed, and thus hard to modify in response to changing requirements. More recently, service providers have used workflow systems to automate the process of fulfilling these orders and have stressed flow-through, emphasizing the ability to process an order without human intervention, as the primary metric for assessing their operation. While flow-through is an effective measure of the service provider's efficiency in fulfilling orders, it does not directly reflect the customer's experience with receiving the service. Often the fulfillment of orders is complicated by the need for service providers to partner, or obtain goods and/or services from a plethora of suppliers, to deliver the requested service. For example, an end-to-end virtual private network service might involve a partnership between a long-haul carrier, who provides cross-country networking, and two access carriers who connect the long-haul carrier's networking points-of-presence with the actual customer locations.
A pre-programmed workflow-based approach offers limited flexibility in dealing with partners or suppliers. The operations for selecting partners are generally specified into the workflow definition and cannot readily adapt in a dynamic fashion to variations such as groups of partners offering different components, multiple partners offering similar capabilities or the addition of new partners with different capability sets. Thus these systems lead to static partnering arrangements that are not well suited for rapid response to dynamic market needs and improving the customer experience.
In U.S. Pat. No. 6,845,507, “Method and system for straight through processing”, Kenton describes a mechanism for simplifying the manual creation of a workflow that manages processes that span disparate systems. While Kenton does not specifically address the concept of partnering, one could imagine that his disparate systems include both service provider and partner systems. Kenton describes a mechanism to make it easier for users to manually create flows that cross such boundaries, focusing primarily on the adaptors necessary to support messaging between the systems using various formats. Such a system could be used to manually define a workflow that would provide federated order fulfillment, but would not include dynamic, run-time partner selection.
In U.S. Pat. No. 7,039,597, “Method and system for managing collaboration within and between enterprises”, Notani et al. describe a computerized mechanism to support workflow collaboration across enterprises. Their approach focuses on collaborating parties defining and executing a workflow. In the disclosed workflow management, the central process has a complete set of the software functions that make up the distributed workflow, and transmits these functions to other systems for execution. The computer-aided collaborative design operation of Notani et al., which can provide a speed improvement over manual techniques, is best suited for long-lived, static partnering arrangements, and does not facilitate dynamic partnering.
In U.S. Pat. No. 6,260,024, “Method and apparatus for facilitating buyer-driven purchase orders on a commercial network system”, Shkedy describes an approach to pooling buyers' requirements into a transaction with one or more sellers. Shkedy's focus is on dynamically merging buyer demands as a means of improving negotiations with sellers, and does not address enabling sellers to team dynamically to meet the buyer's demands, as represented by the customer's order for a service.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,315,509, “Artificial intelligence system for item analysis for rework shop orders”, Natarajan describes a system for planning shop work schedules based on knowledge of the availability and location of required items. Natarajan's focus is on the manufacture of physical goods, and using the availability and location of physical parts to determine how to schedule repairs and/or changes in response to identified defects. It does not anticipate application to communications and information services that are not composed of physical goods. Furthermore, Natarajan does not address the concept of dynamic creation of the new instance, but rather posits that the “re-work order” identifies the item to be replaced and the replacement item, which can then be located.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,459,663, “Data processing machine and method of allocating inventory stock for generating work orders for producing manufactured components”, Dye describes a system for allocating the stock of physical parts to jobs and work orders on a dynamic basis. As with Natarajan, Dye does not anticipate application of these techniques to anything other than manufactured goods. Dye describes automatically generating orders for manufactured parts that are used in the creation of the ordered item. Dye does not address the dynamic aspects of selecting among multiple sources for these manufactured parts, or direct interactions with the manufacturers of these parts to determine information such as delivery dates.
There is also a body of work on general adaptation of workflows. For example, in “Agent Work: a workflow system supporting rule-based workflow adaptation,” [Data & Knowledge Engineering archive, Volume 51, Issue 2 (November 2004), Pages: 223-256, ISSN: 0169-023X], Muller et al describe how a work flow can be adapted in response to feedback, exceptions and events based on a set of pre-defined rules. This type of adaptation is designed to address problems in the logic of the flow that could result in adverse outcomes, by, for example, altering steps in a patient care flow that dispense a specific medicine after the user is found to be allergic to it. Such adaptation can modify a set of steps, but does not provide a mechanism for interacting with partner entities to determine the optimum choices for dynamically creating or adapting a flow instance.
Hence, the prior solutions adapt work flows without the concept of dynamic partner selection. Limited flexibility in dealing with partners or suppliers is provided and no means for dynamically adapting to variations, such as groups of partners offering different components or the addition of new partners with different capability sets, is given. Dynamic systems use the adaptation to address faults and failures, rather than to select optimal partners. The systems that touch on some aspects of partnering do not envision that such partner selection can be dynamic. Similarly, concepts used in managing a supply chain have been applied most commonly to managing physical goods. However, the constraints associated with physical goods (e.g., shipping lead times) are a major impediment to dynamic partnering. Thus there exists a need for a system and method in which providers of communication, information and entertainment services can incorporate dynamic partnering arrangements enabling rapid response to dynamic market needs, and can combine dynamic selection of partnerships and implementation to achieve order fulfillment.